Spotify became the latest company to tell employees they can work from home until 2021, Music Business Worldwide reported. It joins other major tech firms in taking such a decision.

MBW understands that a memo went out earlier today (May 21) explaining that SPOT is following local guidelines on the re-opening of its offices during the current pandemic, and will be taking a “phased approach” on the matter. As part of this strategy, the company has informed its employees that they can individually decide with “full discretion” whether or not to return to company workspaces before next year. According to its latest annual fiscal report, Spotify employed 4,405 people on a full-time basis worldwide in 2019, with 2,121 in the United States and 1,437 in Sweden.

Apple regularly pushes its stance on privacy, working to turn it into a competitive advantage. In the latest in a series of pieces on the company, Wired looks at how its approach to privacy both helps and hinders the company.

Apple is able to do this because its business doesn’t rely on advertising. “Apple doesn’t have that need to have access to data,” independent security researcher Robin Wood says. Google, on the other hand, is one of the world’s biggest advertising companies and can sell ads for greater sums if it knows more about users and their interests. “Because Apple doesn’t have to have the data, they can put the effort into not having it,” Wood says. One such example is found in Apple Maps. Apple says it doesn’t collect detailed journey information: when you travel from home to work, for example, it breaks up the journey into small chunks. This way, it doesn’t hold a complete record of your route (from which it would be easy to identify you). It has also introduced a new technique it calls “fuzzing”: when you search for a destination on your phone, Apple will change the location information it stores to be less precise 24 hours later, meaning it can’t be used to identify where you have been.

No corner has been left untouched by the coronavirus pandemic. Even the rollout of emojis has been delayed, from March 2021 until September 2021, The Guardian reported.

That will have a knock-on effect for OS at Apple and Google, who will struggle to implement the new designs on their normal timescale. All of which means that 2021 might see no brand new emojis. That’s more of a hit than it might seem. On an emotional level, the rollout of new emojis is important people who want to represent themselves in the lingua franca of the 21st century. And on a technical level, the pictograms are an important carrot dangled by the smartphone manufacturers to get people to go through the effort of installing software updates, which are crucial to protect users from security vulnerabilities and hacking attacks.